Cool Finds

Archaeologists Identify Traces of Children’s Fingerprints Still Visible on Clay Beads Created 15,000 Years Ago

Discovered in present-day Israel, the beads suggest that Natufian groups used clay for symbolic purposes many years earlier than scholars previously thought, according to a new study

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

March 24, 2026

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Archaeologists in Israel have analyzed a trove of clay beads and pendants sculpted by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago. According to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances, these artifacts suggest that humans in this region were using clay symbolically thousands of years earlier than scholars thought.

“This discovery completely changes how we understand the relationship between clay, symbolism and the emergence of settled life,” says lead author Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a statement.

The 142 ornaments were found at four sites associated with the Natufian culture—el-Wad, Nahal Oren, Hayonim and Eynan-Mallaha—across three millennia. Inhabitants of these sites shaped the small beads by hand into cylinders, disks and ellipses.

Traces of organic plant fiber identified on some of the beads suggest that they were worn on strings. Many of them had also been decorated with red ochre using “a technique known as engobe, a thin layer of liquid clay smoothed onto the surface,” per the statement. “This is the earliest known use of this coloring technique anywhere in the world.”

The clay ornaments are covered with fingerprints, palm prints and “fingertip depressions,” according to the study. Some of these markings appear to have been made by children. For example, the researchers think that a child pinched one elliptical bead “at the moment when the wet clay was pressed directly onto the thread,” as they write in the study. “Children were also manufacturers rather than just curious onlookers.”

Previously, scholars assumed that clay didn’t serve an ornamental purpose for Natufian groups during this period, and only five clay beads from this era were known to exist. But the “sheer number and diversity” of beads and pendants suggest that clay had become “a medium for visual communication long before it was used for bowls or jars,” according to the statement.

The Natufians were one of the world’s first cultures to settle in one place. “Becoming villagers for the first time changed their perception of the world, of the environment, and of their own identity and how to express themselves,” Davin tells Haaretz’s Ruth Schuster.

The researchers identified 19 bead shapes in the collection of clay ornaments. Some of these shapes resemble foods the Natufians collected and ate, including barley, lentils, peas and flax. Those foods would later become “the backbone of agriculture,” per the statement.

“These new shapes, which emerged at the dawn of village life when wild plants were intensively gathered, suggest that plants were also important in the symbolic sphere of early villagers,” Davin tells IFLScience’s Tom Hale. “It seems that plants—and particularly those that would be domesticated a few millennia later during the Neolithic—played an increasingly important role in shaping the identity of early villagers. In relation to the Neolithic transition, this suggests that the origins of this long-term phenomenon lie in the emergence of the sedentary lifestyle within the Natufian culture.”

The French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin proposed that the shift to farming was preceded by advancements in human thought. “The idea is that a spiritual transformation led Neolithic communities to perceive themselves as more and more distinct from nature and therefore able to control it,” Davin tells IFLScience.

Last year, Davin co-authored a study on a clay figurine found in northern Israel. The artifact, which depicts a woman with a goose on her back, was found at the site of a Natufian village, where residents once hunted gazelles, practiced weaving, and collected flint and limestone, reported Reuters’ Will Dunham in November 2025.

Leore Grosman, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was also a co-author of both studies. She told Reuters that the figurine was evidence “that the sedentary lifestyle generated major transformations in social structures—both between humans and between humans and their surrounding environment—which then led to major transformations in storytelling, symbolic expression and artistic techniques.”

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Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.